Rebel militia are destabilising the governments in the Baltic States. Their activities strongly echo the problems caused by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine in 2014 which led to the formation of the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples Republics.

Allegedly funded and armed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was elected to his fourth term in office with a 90% majority in 2018, the militia in the Baltic states are a formidable force.

Gathering on the border is a vast Russian army.

Pro-Russian soldiers march near a Ukrainian army base in Perevalne, Crimea (Image: AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

President Putin is promising to quell the instability on his doorstep and protect ethnic Russians living in the Baltic States with a quick, decisive, show of force.

The elected leaders in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, all members of the EU and Nato, are pleading for help.

In this imagined but far-from-impossible or unprecedented universe, who will respond?

Read More

Embroiled in a campaign for re-election in America, will Donald Trump be willing to commit American troops to a conflict in an area he sees as Russia’s backyard?

The percentage of ethnic Russians in Estonia and Latvia make up around 24% and 27% of the populations as a whole.

A British soldier in the Adazi training area in Latvia

If Trump, who famously described the Nato military alliance as “obsolete”, decides to take the line that Russia has legitimate interests to defend in the region, will Nato have the strength to act without America?

Where will that leave Nato’s famed Article 5, the commitment that declares all members “agree that an armed attack against one or more of them... shall be considered an attack against them all and... each of them will assist”.

A tank parked on the Celtic Manor gold course during the Nato summit (Image: Rob Browne)

What kind of economic state will the UK be in, two years after the deadline for negotiating Brexit has passed and the realities of life outside the EU are truly known?

Would leaders in Germany, France or Italy have the political and military capability to take on Russia without significant backing from the two nations, the US and the UK, that have arguably been the backbone of Nato’s military capability?

Read More

Or will this be the opportunity for a new world order to be shaped – a new power to flex its muscles on the world stage and stand against Russia.

And would that be the EU or would it be a Chinese government that may well be in the middle of a protectionist trade war with a Trump administration that has slapped huge tariffs on Chinese products in an effort to repatriate American jobs?

If Europe doesn't try to shape the world, China will

Or might we know by the eve of 2021 that President Trump is a different leader to the politician we’ve seen so far?

These are just some of the questions we face in wondering what the world will look like at the start of 2021. In four years the realities of post-Brexit life will be clear, and we will know whether Trump's Republicans have pursued policies as protectionist and inward-looking as is feared today.

The next few years look set to shape all our futures in ways that are almost impossible to predict. We may well have a giant wall between America and Mexico, two nations with a toxic political relationship but an almost umbilical economic one.

Trump won in 2016 by galvanising support among people who regarded the political class as incompetent sophists who make glib promises but can scarcely deliver a Christmas card, never mind a policy agenda. His wall, therefore, is a huge test of an incoming president.

The Great Wall of China

The new president must fulfil a promise so big that people will stand its shadow and marvel at its dimensions. Will he follow in the footsteps of Qin Shi Huang (247-220BC), the first emperor of a unified China, and go to work on a Great Wall that will represent not just an engineering feat but a permanent monument to his presidency?

“Look,” he can exclaim as the bulldozers roll and cement pours into foundations gouged along the border with Mexico. “I’m a spectacular president keeping an amazing election promise.

“Stick with me folks,” he will say as the election campaign of 2020 gathers in toxicity and acrimony. “I deliver on my promises.”

And what impact will his activities be having in Mexico, a nation that despite its proximity to great wealth, has been seeing poverty increase and where 25 million Mexicans make less than $14 a day.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Prime Minister Theresa May may be finding it a significantly trickier task to pacify the electorate.

If she, as promised, triggers Article 50 in March this year, the two-year negotiations will have ended in March 2019.

Even with the phased introduction of our departure that she hopes to be able to negotiate – potentially at the cost of agreeing to the giant €60bn divorce bill the EU is demanding – by 2021 we will be largely out of the EU.

Ms May did not promise to build a wall between Britain and Europe. She did not pledge to funnel cement into the Channel Tunnel or impose an immediate ban on the import of fruit-flavoured beers from Belgium.

Instead, she set herself the mission of performing a successful Brexit. This involves nothing as tangible as a bricks and mortar construction project, but is a task of nano-scale complexity.

Can Theresa May solve the Brexit puzzle?

She must negotiate a divorce from the European Union while also striking trade deals that will put the UK on course for prosperity.

It would be one thing to embark on such a challenge if you had spent all your life yearning to cut the cord with Brussels.

But Mrs May was a quiet supporter of staying in the EU and it is not hard to imagine visions of chaos which must engulf her imagination when she looks at how the next four years could unfold.

In a multitude of action movies there is the scene when we watch the timer on a giant bomb tick down towards zero. Can our hero overcome a series of mighty obstacles before he or she is immolated in the imminent explosion?

Starting Brexit negotiations is akin to starting the timer. If Mrs May does not conclude a deal within two years the UK could tumble out of the EU without any agreement into a frightening world of tariffs and trade barriers.

How will Welsh exports be hit by leaving the EU and losing single market membership? (Image: Andrew Matthews/PA Wire)

There is so much that can go wrong during this short period of time. This split-up could feature more histrionics than any Hollywood divorce.

As well as the €60bn euro reportedly demanded by EU negotiators as an exit charge, if we try to negotiate continued access to the single market for specific sectors such as cars or financial services they may well expect annual contributions running into the billions of euros.

The likes of Spain could also demand very hefty payments towards the health costs of the 70,000 retired Brits who have settled under that nation’s sunny skies.

If we start to splutter, the negotiating team can point to the ticking clock and say, “I’m terribly sorry but time is running out”.

And if they want to make us feel a little more desperate, they can easily stall proceedings by demanding a pause every time a major EU state has an election or discovers a new variety of pigeon.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is up for election this year (Image: AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

Eurosceptics at home will fume and denounce any concession, especially if the EU demands the European Court of Justice arbitrates in future trade disputes. But on top of having to negotiate a transitional deal, Mrs May could also have to deal with a second Scottish independence referendum.

The nastier the future outside the EU looks, the easier it will be for the SNP to persuade people to back a new future as a nation state snug in the European family.

Mrs May’s nightmare scenario for 2021 would see a debt-bedraggled UK shorn of Scotland outside the UK pleading with the EU to lower its drawbridge and reduce its tariffs while major employers flee and investment evaporates.

She will hope that Labour’s fortunes are not transformed during such a season of strife so that it can win the 2020 election or cobble together an anti-Tory coalition in the Commons.

Theresa May will have to key an eye not just on the opposition but on the MPs behind her

Right now she will be alert to the possibility that if things go badly in the EU negotiations figures on the Conservative right may argue that what’s needed is a “real Brexiteer” in Downing Street, and there is no shortage of ambitious men and women who would be talked up as potential leadership challengers.

If a financial crisis ensues and capital spending grinds to a halt we will still be wondering in 2021 when the electrification of the Great Western line will reach Swansea and moaning about the lack of broadband.

Is it possible that President Trump could come to the rescue? As part of his planned renegotiation of the trade deal that unites the US with Canada and Mexico, might he add a clause that allows the UK to join the club?

Theresa May is due to meet Donald Trump in the near future (Image: PA)

This would trigger howls of protest on the British left. Theresa May would be accused of opening up the NHS and other public services to takeover by US corporations and unions would warn of a race to the bottom with workers’ rights.

Trump is such a fierce critic of existing trade deals that he will be under pressure to make this an arrangement that will enrich the US.

And if by this time he has followed through with pledges to unleash a new era of fossil fuel exploitation, UK environmentalists will balk at the idea of linking up with the world’s polluter in chief.

If Trump’s idea of green energy goes no further than lighting up his golf courses, other countries will vie to become the world leader in renewable power.

This is a crown that China will want to win, in an era in which it may well be in the midst of a power struggle with a globally-retreating United States.

Will China shape history in the next 50 years in the way the United States has in the last half century?

In 2015, it became the world’s biggest investor in renewable energy, spending $103bn – 36% of total global investment.

It is hard to predict how a protectionist trade war would affect China. Trump plans to bring car manufacturing jobs back to the US by whacking penalties on companies that do the assembly overseas. But how will that affect China?

Will these be the years in which this rapidly-waking giant can spark life into its domestic market so that it no longer depends on being the workshop of the world and can develop its own consumer economy?

2021 is tipped as the year when China will begin mass production of self-driving cars. Will those cars not just be built in China but sold there in their multi-millions as well?

Detroit has struggled with the decline of the auto industry

That itself brings its own wave of questions. Because a consumer economy means a growing quality of life and as economies develop the demands of those populations for political rights grow as well.

The emergence of China as a world power may well also destabilise the politically-controlling communist dictatorship that has ruled there since Mao. How will domestic Chinese politics impact its own determination to grow as a regional and world power.

Trump has pledged to abandon the epic Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that Obama worked so hard to secure.

Beijing may well want to respond by engineering one of its own that conclusively establishes it and not the US as the region’s pre-eminent economic power.

At the same time, if Beijing decides that a Trump White House is tired of spending billions annually on military bases in East Asia it will accelerate its efforts to claim island territory in order to dominate the South China Ocean and its shipping routes.

The US may be the country that put a man on the moon, but Trump will have to ensure that its reputation for innovation does not crumble on his watch.

There is talk of China landing a probe on the dark side of the Moon in 2021 and India has its own ambitions for manned space flight.

Pundits have chattered about US decline for decades and been proved wrong. Facebook wasn’t invented in Berlin, YouTube wasn’t pioneered in Glasgow and Google wasn’t created in Cardiff.

But there is the danger that the online revolution which has done so much to generate American wealth could also threaten its future.

If Vladimir Putin’s relationship with Trump deteriorates as quickly as it did with Bush and Obama, these two countries could find themselves locked in a destructive campaign of cyberwarfare.

Modern saboteurs may well work online (Image: istock)

One week the traffic lights in Moscow could go on the blink, a few days later embarrassing CCTV footage from inside a US embassy could appear online. Cold War politics would return with a vengeance if Russian hackers crash the Nasdaq or American counterparts manage to shut down Siberian power plants.

But millions of Europeans will be worried if by 2021 Trump and Putin are brothers in arms.

People in the Baltic states will fear that the US will do nothing to resist Kremlin efforts to undermine liberal governments and pull Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia back into Russia’s sphere of influence.

This will pose a dilemma for Mrs May or her successor. The UK may be out of the EU by this time, but it will not have quit Nato.

The UK and France – providing the republic has not fallen into the hands of the far right – could join forces to assure former Communist states that they have the diplomatic, economic and military firepower to protect their independence.

Read More

But what relationship will those nations have after what may well turn out to be politically-acrimonious Brexit negotiations.

Across the Atlantic, the biggest challenges to Trump’s ambitions probably won’t come from foreign powers, but from radical social change.

Fans of Donald Trump cheered his pledge to defend US jobs but will technological change lead to waves of lay-offs? (Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Blue collar workers have taken a hammering in recent decades but there are fears of a full-on ‘robopocalypse’ as millions of remaining jobs disappear into the next wave of automation.

According to the American Trucking Associations, there are 3.5 million truck drivers – more than the entire population of Wales – employed in the United States.

What will happen to such a legion of workers if driverless trucks become a reality? What fate awaits taxi and bus drivers?

The robotic revolution has the potential to eliminate swathes of low-paid jobs with positions as diverse as fruit-pickers and cashiers under threat. Equally, a combination of outsourcing and artificial intelligence means that skilled data processing and customer service jobs could vanish.

The US languishes below the OECD average in children’s maths skills and is unimpressive when it comes to reading and science. America will remain home to many of the world’s most prestigious universities and will have no trouble educating its elite, but can it equip the masses with the skills they will need for a basic job?

Will Donald Trump's greatest challenge be boosting skill levels of young Americans?

Trump’s chances of re-election will be dashed if there is epic unemployment and he alienates the giant Hispanic population by blaming this on immigration. But Trump was able to calculate a remarkable road to victory in 2016 he will be already plotting a winning trajectory for 2020.

The hunt is on for a Democrat who can limit the Trump era to four years and Michelle Obama will be urged by fans on a daily basis to give it a go. Liberal Brits will hope the party picks an Anglophile.

Future PM Harold Macmillan said in the 1940s: “These Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.”

Mrs May will hope that by 2021 Britain is not facing the economic and social chaos of present day Greece. And she will pray that the Pax Americana is not replaced with a chapter of global barbarism.